of time" was approaching and with it cataclysm perhaps, but also judgment and eternal bliss for the righteous.
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Mood was one thing. The Puritans craved the certainty and the substance that would convert it into knowledge about the final sequences which would bring the end. To gain this knowledge they consulted the Prophecies, but the metaphorical quality of these Scriptures invited disagreement as surely as they raised expectations. The gaining of knowledge required practical study. And so Puritan historians, who aspired to become prophets, began the process of searching the past for the fulfillment of scriptural prophecy. Their method was to compare theory and reality, the predictions of the Bible and the events of the "objective" world.
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The Scriptures disclosed the signs of the last days in a bewildering variety. David sang of the "wondrous works" that signalled the end; the Puritans could not help but believe that they would be wondrous, but their apparently infinite number made them hard to sort out from Providence and other divine intrusions into the affairs of men. Daniel promised that knowledge would increase in the last days, and apparently it was increasing, especially as it concerned the number and extent of the prophecies. But Paul, while apparently agreeing that men would in the last days be "ever learning," also concluded that they would be "never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.'' Paul was not exactly happy at the prospects for moral behavior during the last days either. They would be "perilous times," and men "shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy." The list went on; happily, other passages promised better things in statecraft: revolution, for example, that would overturn the ungodly, and upheavals that would shake the wicked from power. Nature, too, would give tokens of the impending end. They were not calculated to sooth lovers of quietthere would be earthquakes, said John; and the prophet Joel scanning the universe discerned the promise of the earth of ''blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke," and in the heavens, of the sun "turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come." 19
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Reading the events of the pastand the presentin the light of the prophecies could be a stimulating but nevertheless an un-
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